Humankind: impressive but not good (yet?)

[Elhoim]

I guess that the infrastructure feels a bit too much since we got used to the small amount of buildings of Civ VI. Basically, the "infrastructures" are the "buildings" in Endless Legend or even older Civs. Plus having them in these beautiful but huge squares instead of a nice, compacted list makes them seem much more than what they are.

 

[Siptah]

I think that the usefulness of infrastructure and how you feel about their quantity depends heavily on your play style: the more cities you build, the less important they are and you might think that there are way too many of them in the game. If you attach a lot of land to few cities or just have a single huge city, the benefit of infrastructures increases as more citizens(!)/tiles will benefit from each, while at the same time districts become less attractive as their benefits do not scale with population or much at all (adjacencies increase, maybe you get to slightly better tiles), while their cost increases and they have the negative stability drawback on top of that.

@Elhoim you can switch to list view, but it requires you to being capable of recognizing the thumbnails of the infrastructures

 

[Elhoim]

I think that the usefulness of infrastructure and how you feel about their quantity depends heavily on your play style: the more cities you build, the less important they are and you might think that there are way too many of them in the game. If you attach a lot of land to few cities or just have a single huge city, the benefit of infrastructures increases as more citizens(!)/tiles will benefit from each, while at the same time districts become less attractive as their benefits do not scale with population or much at all (adjacencies increase, maybe you get to slightly better tiles), while their cost increases and they have the negative stability drawback on top of that.

Yeah, I tend to play OCC and I'm not bothered by the amount. But it's true that when you start a new city, you have a huge list and they take a lot of time to build it gives the feeling of "too many for too much for too little".

@Elhoim you can switch to list view, but it requires you to being capable of recognizing the thumbnails of the infrastructures

I know, but it's not really a proper, comfortable list (icon on the left side + name, which funnily is how the "list mode" is presented in the toggle), but instead small thumbnail squares that make it even harder to notice which one was it. Not only for infrastructures, but for units or quarters as well. I feel like I spend more time squinting at them thinking "which one is that...?" than scrolling the big list

It's easier for my brain to remember names (archer, spearman, aqueduct, makers quarter) than complex images in a very small size (Plus I play with a reduced UI, at 80% so there's that as well).

 

[Abegweit]

That's actually the one thing they did sell me on! I was sceptic at first, but I really like picking a new culture every era. When they introduce customizable avatars with perks and points you can invest, and if they let me chose a banner and color and such, then this could become really fun. Personally I am not beyond the hope of thinking they cannot address these faults. I think they still can, and if they do this game will blow civ6 definitely out of the water for me. Yet, a lot of balancing work needs to be done. And it might take a lot longer and some updates and dlc's before it all gets straigthened out.

I pretty much agree with you about the civ changes. That was one of the things which attracted me to humankind. Now, however, I view it as something of an annoyance since I have to figure who the AIs are every few dozen turns. Perhaps this could be fixed with an improvement to the UI. In any case it is just yet another quibble.

There are a few classic 4X games. Civ4 was one of them. It was a labour of love built by afficandos of the genre. Many of them had already devoted hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours playing Civ3. They vowed to make a better game, and they succeeded. Civ6 could have been another one. The game mechanics are just excellent. Unfortunately, Firaxis had since learned that a commercial success is not the same thing as a superb game. The vast majority of gamers play on Settler or Prince. They want a pleasant experience and after playing one or five times, they will move on to the next game. So Firaxis gave them what wanted. They could have created a truly memorable game. All they would have needed to do was to fix the horrible AI. Instead they gave us vampires and zombies.

Humankind will be a huge commercial success. I have no doubt. It has everything the casual gamer could want. Lotsa civs? check. Tech tree? check. Events? check. Diplomacy? check. Religion? check. Wonders? check. Never mind how these features work together or even if they work on their own. Plus, as everyone agrees, the game is simply gorgeous. Play it once or twice and forget that this could have been a great game.

Did you fill out the survey at the end? Reading between the lines, they seem to be proud of their diplomacy screen. At first I was astonished because I thought that the purpose of a diplomacy screen was, you know, diplomacy. But if you think about it in their terms then it makes sense. It's about pretty characters with human gestures. I don't like the trash-talking men and the smart-ass women but I could believe that many (most?) people do.

So will humankind be a commercial success? Yes. Will it be a game to remember? Sad to say the answer is no.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

. . . So will humankind be a commercial success? Yes. Will it be a game to remember? Sad to say the answer is no.

I confess I have never found any computer game 'out of the box' to be Perfect. I've played a lot of Civ games since 2, but in many cases that's because there was nothing else like them to compare with or play instead.
My current hope is that Humankind will have enough initial success to spur the Amplitude team to start improving it - adding or modifying features that are needed or don't work. I am (perhaps against the evidence!) convinced that there is a 'sweet spot' where a game's design and implementation can satisfy both the casual mass of gamers and the maniacally-dedicated 'Fanatics'. I've seen it done with board games and miniatures rules, I see no inherent reason it cannot be done with a computer game: Civ IV, as so many have commented, came close, so I remain Optimistic.

 

[Atlas627]

I very much want this game to be great because they have adopted several of the changes I've been arguing for for years regarding Civ. The main one is that you score over time by being good in different categories, and choosing to advance to the next era or not changes that score. So when you're strong you'll want to let other people pass you for more points (sometimes) or snowball into a suffocating lead (other times), and when you're behind you'll be able to catch up in score because the game can afford to give you slingshot mechanics since you actually earn score by being ahead for a period of time, not by being ahead at the end. This is something Field of Glory: Empires did well as well.

Unfortunately, the game is currently balanced such that it is simply a yield-fest, much like Civ. Everything has been abstracted into the same 7 yields, which all function quite similarly. Food thresholds was an interesting difference that has been removed. Fortunately Food is still used a little differently because Population is needed for Units, but otherwise Food just leads to more of all the other yields. Production also leads to more of all the other yields, as there isn't much to build besides other things that give yields. Gold can be spent anywhere yes, but the only things you can't buy with Gold are the multicity projects which, you guessed it, can get production from anywhere. Science lets you advance through the tree, but most of the unlocks are...things you build for more yields. Influence let's you take territory for more yields. Religion is...more yields but behind the scenes so you don't even really pay attention to how much you get. Stability doesn't seem to do much unless you totally ignore it.

City Limit is nice, but there's no Attached Territory limit, so I'm not finding reasons to fight each limit in different contexts, I'm just building cities until I can't, then attaching them for the rest of the game because that's more profitable. There's no District limit, so if the math works out toward urban sprawl then I'm going hard on the Districts. Something like you can build adjacent to Administrative-Center-adjacent Districts until Early Modern (and you get Hamlets at Medieval), at which point you can also build adjacent to Harbors, then Industrial let you also build adjacent to Luxury/Strategic extractors, that would've been nice. A new ability in a new era, not just a higher-scale yield generator.

Army Size limit is good. The Wonder system is wonderfully limiting yet powerful. Some of the Civics unlock new abilities, which is great! Most of them are just extra yields, though.

And there are so many things that are "more yields", that even the special ones don't feel so special. Like seeing Babylon give me Science per tech I've researched should make me say "wow, this enables a new strategy to bother less with science as I progress, since it will be handled for me", but I earn so much Science from all the other sources that I literally don't notice Babylon's Legacy trait. For this to be balanced such that Babylon's Legacy trait was useful on a strategic (or even tactical) level, most of the game would need to be inconsequential individually, because simply *so much* of the game is yield generation.

And where's the slingshot mechanic? Something that actually threatens me that is built into the game (not caused by another player, for which the AI needs to be competent, but caused by my own success and enforced by the game)? My successful empire never falls into Decadence or Corruption. Make my Science costs increase by the number of Science stars I've earned over the course of the game or something. Increase District costs by how many Builder stars I've earned over the course of the game. Increase Attachment costs by how many Expansionist stars I've earned (but not new Cities, since there's a City Limit to help with that). Increase Wonder claim costs by the number of Influence stars I've earned. Reduce Combat Strength for Militarist stars, I dunno. Make me choose between score and power. I'm still playing just like Civ, snowballing all my yields because they also give me points.

The game is so close. It's broken out of a lot of stagnant design the Civ series has been saddled with due to its IP. Time to take this to the moon.

 

[snakeboy]

Religion seems to be a huge contributor to the unbalanced snowballing. I am playing a game now where I failed to 'get' a religion. I delayed my holy site, and now my neighbor is the religious leader. Now I cannot place down any holy sites at all (except for wonders). I find that strange, but it does give me the ability to gauge what religion does for you. And that is a lot. I have a lot less influence & gold than in my religion-playthroughs. Also more stabilities issues. I am in the III era and still slightly behind my neighbor in fame, but way above the other ai, so that tells as well how religion gives you easy fame points. And besides putting down holy sites all the bonuses come automatically.

There's another thing. I did play my first two runs 'wrong' because I did not understand the attach outpost mechanic. Now that I generally have one city and three territories, it does solve the building overwhelm & repetition, because infrastructure now goes for the whole region. I like that.

 

[mitsho]

I would love if when building infrastructures it would tell you how much yields it would give beforehand. I find it very hard to guess the effectiveness and thus tend to just buy them. It's less a decision.

Generally I agree with a lot of these points in here, i just have a lot of buts as well. For example, maybe I just know the rules not well enough and that's why a lot of things look as confusing. But I'm still excited for the game, and for now would rather play a bit more than commenting in here

 

[snakeboy]

I would love if when building infrastructures it would tell you how much yields it would give beforehand. I find it very hard to guess the effectiveness and thus tend to just buy them. It's less a decision.

Agreed. If you cannot gauge what a building does for you, decisions become less meaningful.

...maybe I just know the rules not well enough and that's why a lot of things look as confusing.

Yes, that is very true too. I am seeing that as well (and my civ6 conditioning is both a blessing and a curse).

I still think there will remain quite a few real balancing issues, but some things might be resolved with better information. They really have to try harder explaining what things do in this game.

 

[Siptah]

They really have to try harder explaining what things do in this game.

This is really were I have the largest doubts. AFAIR I was really lost for quite a few games in Endless Legend with the many systems and how they interact, despite reading the in-game information. In the end, internet videos and forums will help to understand any mechanic and implications (except for the Victoria II economy), but I'm old school and think that a game should be understandable (but not necessarily mastered) without external info and the experience of 100h played. I also don't understand why they don't include nested tooltips. Should be industry standard for complex games since CK3.

 

[snakeboy]

I also don't understand why they don't include nested tooltips. Should be industry standard for complex games since CK3.

I watched a humankind twitch stream yesterday and a dev popped up in chat. The streamer complained about the lack of proper information, and he said he agreed but that ui was really hard and they had trouble finding good ui people. And that ubisoft was hunting all the talent.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

To be good it mostly needs polish, balance and UI

The one thing I think could have made it great is to really allow for rise and fall. In a normal 4X game, you build up your empire and it’s yields because stacking up yields (science, production, territory, etc.) is how you win.

However with fame and eras, If my empire expands massively in the Medieval era and then collapsed in Early Modern could still be a big help for my win.

For that to happen there needs to be two changes
1. Fame should be based on improvement over your starting point for this era, not an absolute level (even if you lose territories with districts you still build some new ones, etc....culture and money fame already works like this)
2. Some collapse mechanism so that you are more likely to lose territory /harder to gain territory the bigger/more powerful you are (possibly based around era

...This does mean that it needs to be easier to gain/regain territory and rebuild (and harder to get crushed...I like the vassal mechanics)

 

[Siptah]

2. Some collapse mechanism so that you are more likely to lose territory /harder to gain territory the bigger/more powerful you are

The board game option for this would be either a dice roll whenever you change cultures that determines how many territories/units/districts/money/influence you lose (and that factors in how much you have) or a bunch of rebels popping up combined with a great loss of stability. This way you could also get rid of the extra fame for transcending, as the benefit of staying with your culture would be that you do not have to deal with this "disaster." However, as Humankind is a computer game, many players would just save scum until the negative effects are tolerable.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

To be good it mostly needs polish, balance and UI

The one thing I think could have made it great is to really allow for rise and fall. In a normal 4X game, you build up your empire and it’s yields because stacking up yields (science, production, territory, etc.) is how you win.

However with fame and eras, If my empire expands massively in the Medieval era and then collapsed in Early Modern could still be a big help for my win.

For that to happen there needs to be two changes
1. Fame should be based on improvement over your starting point for this era, not an absolute level (even if you lose territories with districts you still build some new ones, etc....culture and money fame already works like this)
2. Some collapse mechanism so that you are more likely to lose territory /harder to gain territory the bigger/more powerful you are (possibly based around era

...This does mean that it needs to be easier to gain/regain territory and rebuild (and harder to get crushed...I like the vassal mechanics)

My very first thought when I first heard about the 'Fame' mechanic for victory in this game was that this would be a perfect mechanic for a non-linear game: gaining and losing Fame relative to your opponents, and even getting so much Fame that being completely destroyed still allowed you to win the game ("The Glory That Was Rome", "The Golden Age The Likes Of Which We Will Never See Again")

Alas, it seems to be implemented as just another completely linear stacking up of elements to produce Fame totals by End of Game.

BUT The Stability mechanic in the game seems to me to be made to order for a Rise and Fall system: you lose Stability fast enough, and your Cities/Outposts revolt and 'break away'. The nice thing about this 'universal' Stability system is that it can operate from beginning of the game to the end. Early on the complete collapse of an Empire would be completely historical but possible to recover from - see the various rising and falling Chinese Dynasties, the Roman 'successor-states' like Medieval France, Germany, Spain, etc, with Roman Foundations, the various Persian Empires built out of the ruins of their predecessors. In the late game, the various Multi-national 'isms' like Socialism, Communism, Fascism can both throttle your Diplomacy and lead your Empire into a Dead End from which it cannot emerge without major disruption: fascists can find themselves only friends with other fascists, which could be diplomatically fatal, and if correctly modeled, Communism can lead to the same result with the additional problem of being forced to adopt economic policies that are ultimately ruinous.

I'm still waiting to see if such Multinational Influences are in the last Eras of the game, because they could 'shake up' your stroll to victory enormously and avoid the stifling Late Game Ennui of Civ VI.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The board game option for this would be either a dice roll whenever you change cultures that determines how many territories/units/districts/money/influence you lose (and that factors in how much you have) or a bunch of rebels popping up combined with a great loss of stability. This way you could also get rid of the extra fame for transcending, as the benefit of staying with your culture would be that you do not have to deal with this "disaster." However, as Humankind is a computer game, many players would just save scum until the negative effects are tolerable.

The solution for save scumming is to make it nonrandom. My ideal system was
1. every turn you build up “complacency”...faster the bigger/better you are
Complacency leads to a variety of penalties including rebel units in territories, increased military+district costs, reduced combat strength, etc.
2. at era change you get rid of some complacency....the fewer stars you have the more complacency you get rid of...7 stars loses 100%, 8 stars 90%...17+ stars you don’t lose any complacency.

Then add some more rubber banding (free trickle of research into techs your trade partners/liege has, bonuses for vassals, etc.) and you have a dynamic game where “standing the test of time” is one strategy...another is the one era massive empire (Rome, Mongols, Britain, etc.) that racks up enough fame in one era to potentially win the game.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The solution for save scumming is to make it nonrandom. My ideal system was
1. every turn you build up “complacency”...faster the bigger/better you are
Complacency leads to a variety of penalties including rebel units in territories, increased military+district costs, reduced combat strength, etc.
2. at era change you get rid of some complacency....the fewer stars you have the more complacency you get rid of...7 stars loses 100%, 8 stars 90%...17+ stars you don’t lose any complacency.

Then add some more rubber banding (free trickle of research into techs your trade partners/liege has, bonuses for vassals, etc.) and you have a dynamic game where “standing the test of time” is one strategy...another is the one era massive empire (Rome, Mongols, Britain, etc.) that racks up enough fame in one era to potentially win the game.

I don't think there's any need to add another currency or mechanic to the game to get the effect desired.
As posted above, between the Stability (keeping your Empire Internally coherent) and Influence (another Empire becoming more attractive to your people) currencies already in the game there's already plenty of ways to put a tripwire on your complacent stroll to victory. In the Open Dev, I've already experienced "Osmosis" events in which a neighboring Influential Empire's Civics Choices cause some part of my Faction to want to change the choices I made. This is minor: what if not reacting to such a demand caused a sudden drop in Stability followed by potential Revolt/Revolution/Civil War in my bordering region/territory?
And, of course, expanding into regions adjacent to influential Empires brings the automatic problem that your settlers/city in that region is going to be subject to more pressure. Conquering some region: same thing, only Stability - conquered peoples in a city should lower your Stability for a long time, and that in turn shuld give you real in-game problems keeping your Empire together.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Update: played a couple of hours of Humankind's Open Dev today, and experienced the effect of ignoring Osmosis: after about three notices of an event in one city, checked and found the city Stability down to 45% - about half where it had been before the Osmosis notices. So, in at least the current Build of Humankind, Influence from a neighboring Empire can effect your Stability if you don't take some kind of counter-action. Mind you, so far I haven't seen any actual effect from Stability below 50% in the game, but I think tomorrow I might reload that game and see what happens if I leave the Stability that low for some time . . .

 

[Siptah]

I wonder if, for a less linear change of cultures, Crusader Kings can be an example. When your ruler dies in these games, you get a new one with different traits, education, focuses and situation - so not unlike changing your culture in Humankind. Depending on your inheritance laws, you may lose the majority of your lands, either going to siblings etc. or completely out of your realms. PDS somehow made this not frustrating (once you get used to this happening and plan ahead), but rather very interesting and rebuilding/regaining is often quite fun. There is no randomness in this, despite that you don't know when your ruler is going to die.

Another idea of how to make the game less linear would be to change the fame victory from accumulated score to era score: who acquired the most fame in an era wins this era and in the end the winner of the game is who scored most era wins (2nd or 3rd places could also give points here). The drawback would be that the game could be over quickly once someone won the first three eras. Similarly, if the winner of the game would be who scored the most fame in a single era.

 

[Kwami]

Update: played a couple of hours of Humankind's Open Dev today, and experienced the effect of ignoring Osmosis: after about three notices of an event in one city, checked and found the city Stability down to 45% - about half where it had been before the Osmosis notices. So, in at least the current Build of Humankind, Influence from a neighboring Empire can effect your Stability if you don't take some kind of counter-action. Mind you, so far I haven't seen any actual effect from Stability below 50% in the game, but I think tomorrow I might reload that game and see what happens if I leave the Stability that low for some time . . .

The game doesn't explain to me what osmosis even is. It just says that a city benefited from osmosis. What's it really doing? My stability basically never went under 99% after the first era, so I don't think osmosis was hurting my stability. But what benefit was I getting?

As a more general complaint, the game really doesn't explain how most things work and the information provided in the UI is very, very lacking. The civics are one of the worst examples of this. There's one to choose between atheism and secularism. Both of them completely disable the religion interface, but the secularism one doesn't tell you that. Surprise!

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The game doesn't explain to me what osmosis even is. It just says that a city benefited from osmosis. What's it really doing? My stability basically never went under 99% after the first era, so I don't think osmosis was hurting my stability. But what benefit was I getting?

As a more general complaint, the game really doesn't explain how most things work and the information provided in the UI is very, very lacking. The civics are one of the worst examples of this. There's one to choose between atheism and secularism. Both of them completely disable the religion interface, but the secularism one doesn't tell you that. Surprise!

Ah yes, the "Gotcha!" system of game design. I think the biggest sign that this is a game still under development is the fact that they do not tell you enough about what the consequences are going to be, or even what it is that you are doing, exactly.

Case in point: the Civics Choice: "Irreligion" between Secularism or State Atheism. First of all, I question how that could even be a legitimate choice before the late Industrial Era, if even then: Religion was very much an Undeniable part of Human Existence in every society I've ever heard of until after the Renaissance/Early Modern period - look at the trouble Voltaire got into just questioning some of the tenets of the 'established' religion as late as the Enlghtenment!
Then of course, they don't bother to tell you that all the Civics Choices have a Third Choice: Ignore both of the choices given and don't ever spend a Civics Point on it! I suspect I am not the only gamer who learned about the "Irreligion" choice the hard way, by wiping out about 3/4 of my Science production, which was all coming from the effects of chosen Religious Tenets, by spending a Civics Point on 'Irreligion'.

Needless to say, won't ever make that mistake again, but it leaves me wondering what other pitfalls are waiting in the game to send the unwary gamer plunging onto the stakes below . . .